Health Headlines: New treatment for wounds that won’t heal

Lake Charles, LA (KPLC) - Have you ever had a wound that just wouldn’t go away? Such wounds aren’t just painful, they can be downright dangerous, especially for diabetics. One Southwest Louisiana is sharing his long journey to healing and the new treatment that’s offering hope to others.

John Yerby has been a patient at CHRISTUS St. Patrick’s Wound Care Center since 2013, “I have diabetes and I had a wound on the bottom of my foot that just wouldn’t heal.”

Dr. Tyson Green explained the issues with treating Yerby’s wound saying, “Even though we offloaded, even though we took all of the pressure off that wound, got him everything you could think of to go on that wound it was very, very stagnant.”

This led to years of the wound continuing to reoccur.

Yerby says, “It’s healed two or three different times then it’s reopened and gotten infected.”

But Dr. Green says they weren’t giving up, “There’s got to be a reason for a wound. There’s no such thing as a non-healing wound, we just haven’t figured it out yet.”

And as it turned out, a new technology held the answer.

“Something that we have at our disposal here at the wound care center is called the 3-c patch and it’s something where we can take the patient’s blood, their own body, and spin it down into an actual applicable product,” says Dr. Green.

The product is molded into a patch and stays on the patient’s wound.

“It allows somebody that doesn’t necessarily have all of the growth factors to heal a wound to compact it down to all of those factors and put it right back on to help it heal the wound so they’re essentially healing it themselves we’re just helping them along.”

Yerby says, “It sounded like a good thing to try.”

And the results?

According to Yerby, “It’s drastic it’s been almost completely healed.”

Dr. Green explains, “You know a wound that is very stagnant on the bottom of the foot like his that goes from a nice size like this, which is pretty detrimental on the bottom of your foot, that’s down to a little pinhole that’s pretty drastic results in a short amount of time because we’ve been working with him for a while and haven’t gotten anywhere near those results before.”

He says that’s good news for the treatment of a variety of wounds that for one reason or another, just won’t seem to heal.

The 3C Patch is FDA-cleared for all wound types from head to toe. Medicare insurance is currently covering the cost for patients with diabetes who have a chronic wound. The company who manufactures the 3C Patch, Reapplix, is currently working hard to expand this insurance coverage so that more patients, with or without diabetes, and with different types of wounds can receive the care they need.

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